User's OST file keeps growing

[jackparish]

We have a user who has an OST file that is 35 GB in size on a system that uses Outlook 2010. They only have 3 GB of free space left on their hard drive and we have cleared the system up as much as possible.

They are now having other problems associated with a Windows 7 system on a network that is running out of hard drive space.

We have run repairs on the OST, deleted the OST, tried new Mail profiles but we are having the same issue. We have created new OST files and changed the default but the other one still keeps growing. Any assistance offered helping to solve this will be appreciated.

 

[jackparish]

Outlook Inbox Repair Tool (Scanpst.exe) is a utility that you can use in this case to repair your damaged archive.pst. It is highly recommended that you backup the damaged PST first as running the tool can irreparably damage the file.

• 1. Quit the application
• 2. Scanpst.exe is a hidden file so make sure that the 'Show hidden files and folders' setting is enabled in the folder options
• 3. Click Start | Search, or Find and type 'Scanpst.exe' in the Search box
• 4. Double-click to open the file and browse to the location of your damaged archive.pst
• 5. Click 'Start' to start the recovery process
• 6. Try to open the file in question again. The corruption problem should not exist.

 

[Neemobeer]

The OST file is the offline cache of what that user has in Exchange. Either turn off caching mode for that client in Outlook or tell them to move emails out of the OST to a pst or just simply delete email

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

If this is true, and you have a user with a 35GB OST file in his Outlook; it's unlikely that he's running Exchange; an OST file that large would not properly sync with the Exchange server even it the user's PC was plugged directly into a NIC port on the Exchange server itself--it would crash it immediately! It's unlikely that any tool out there can fix an OST file of this size. It sounds like he's above the 20,000 E-mail messages in the inbox folder limit within Outlook; and that's pretty much the kiss of death for outlook. Neemo's on the right track, he can attempt to copy E-mails to archive folders and get the Outlook inbox back to <500 messages; or delete all the E-mails. If this user has like 100,000 E-mails or something higher (ridiculous!), on any E-mail system I've administered and I've administered a number of them up to 5,000 users in size, we would have revoked this user's account on the Exchange server. Period! This is a complete lack of training for this employee. If you have an IT department, they need to enforce guidelines in the Employee Handbook; if they are not there, they need to be written into it! This user is clearly an E-mail abuser. In most companies, there would be severe penalties for doing this sort of thing. If it's a small company, I've seen owners of the company do stuff like this, because if they are the CEO or President, they are often computer illiterate and do not realize what they are doing is detrimental to the operational health of both their network and their corporate E-mail system.

<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

 

[Neemobeer]

Sadly BBJ we have users with larger OST files than that heheh and they do work fine; however, the max size an OST file can get is 50GB after that you will just get weird errors in Outlook.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Wow!! I'm curious; is that before or after they have their inboxes cleaned out of old and junk emails??

BBJ

 

[Neemobeer]

Sadly after. We don't enforce mailbox limits currently. I was troubleshooting a shared mailbox and gave myself full access to it and it maxed out my OST to 50GBs s that's how I know it's the max size and you basically can't do anything in Outlook then.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Interesting. At some point, you guys will run out of storage on that Exchange server even if you have oodles like TBs or EBs on a SAN connected to the Mail server. When you get to really large numbers of users on your Mail server, you'll have set some limits and guidelines like we did. Probably 500 users or more. Unless you guys have unlimited Cash reserves or something... At one of my companies where I was a network manager I was also in charge of the E-mail admins, and they were always asking for more storage to provide unlimited mailbox size to employees; when we hit a million dollars a year to keep adding storage to our HP Mail servers, I had to put the kai-bosh on that and tell the Mail admins to start enforcing strict limits on mailbox size, otherwise we would have to take their salaries to pay for the additional server storage for the Mail--they got the picture pretty quickly and complied with my request.

 

[Neemobeer]

1000+ users. And no we are fine on storage. Only users that have been at the company for 15+ years have OST files around 35GBs, plus we have over 500TBs of storage.

 

[adomclick]

If you .ost file enable to read due to oversized, try Link Removed to easily restore data from ost file as new pst file which can be open with MS Outlook mailbox.

 

[jdbfjehew]

Superb Regain Softaken OST to PST Converter software is easily working very helpful and design with high algorithm for Outlook client works on off-line Exchange Server and successfully convert OST to PST files with entire email attachments. This software OST to PST Converter software restore unreadable OST files format.